Tag: censorship

The coming together of Water Protectors and the Veterans represents a cognitive shift in perspective. Our ancestral participation in the Manifest Destiny was but a prelude to WWI and WWII, Korea, and the Middle East. The prospect of war with Russia so zealously propagandized by candidate Clinton is still spuriously promoted by President Obama. American troops are being positioned to again serve the will of a false paradigm.

This one is big. It adds to California’s growing reputation as Police State Central.

First we had SB 277, which forced vaccinations on school children. Now we have Assembly Bill 1671, which would make it a crime for journalists to post and report on certain undercover videos, even though they didn’t make the videos.

Mass surveillance has “badly shaken writers’ faith that democratic governments will respect their rights to privacy and freedom of expression,” according to a January 2015 PEN America report based on the responses of 772 writers from fifty countries. Reporting for Common Dreams, Lauren McCauley covered not only the PEN America report, but also a July 2014 report by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch indicating that US journalists and lawyers increasingly avoid work on potentially controversial topics due to fear of government spying.

“The [truth-finding] software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.” […] The new Google program is going to double down. It’s going to set up its own Ministry of Truth. It’s going to standardize algorithms that unerringly bring about officially favored lies.

WikiLeaks has just released an unprecedented Australian censorship order concerning a multi-million dollar corruption case explicitly naming the current and past heads of state of Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, their relatives and other senior officials.

On March 18, 2014 Cass Sunstein released his latest collection of essays, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas. Like his other works geared toward a mainstream readership, the prominent Harvard law professor points to numerous alleged dangers posed by even “rational people” who are susceptible to adopting “crippled epistemologies.” What Sunstein fails to explain throughout his most recent medley of gentle authoritarianism is how the “conspiracy theory” term has received vigorous promotion from the editorial practices of certain major corporate news media.

Those familiar with Project Censored’s work know that we define censorship as “anything that interferes with the free flow of information in a society that purports to have a free press.” This broader conception of censorship includes:

“the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality by mass media… Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (from the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions). Censorship includes stories that were never published, but also those that get such restricted distribution that few in the public are likely to know about them.”

By this standard, each of the news stories in our listing of the top 25 for 2012-13 is a censored story, whether the story has received no corporate coverage at all, or—in cases where the story has received corporate coverage—that coverage is partial in one or both senses of the term, i.e., incomplete and/or biased.

Although many of the Top 25 stories can be interpreted as emphasizing “what’s wrong” in the world today, we hope that our annual list is also understood as a celebration and appreciation of the good work that these independent reporters and news organizations do.

To many people, “esoteric” denotes something obscure, incoherent and belonging to the old libraries of mystical texts, and even as something negative to be feared. But in reality it is literally all around us and absolutely crucial to the understanding of our collective human history and experience. This is the reason why its censorship is so dangerous and should be ringing alarm bells for everybody.

There was a stunning intervention in the TED controversy by 19 leading scientists. In brief it looks like TED Curator Chris Anderson opened Pandora’s Box — further details below — when he authorised the removal of talks by myself and Rupert Sheldrake from the TEDx Youtube channel.

After a weekend of being slammed for both the removal of the videos, and the manner in which they handled it (ie. making up complaints about the talks), TED have edited the page to include a response from Rupert Sheldrake, and retracted the comments originally made (by striking through the text, rather than simply deleting the text). They have also issued a follow-up response to the controversy, which will be clarified further in the next day.

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